The recordings reveal a remarkable violinist
playing with great dash and style and
cultivated musicianship in the manner of the
period, that is, without exaggerated vibrato, but
so incredibly disciplined and clean, with the
authority of the great traditions of the German
and French schools.

Yehudi Menuhin

Maud Powell was born on 22nd August 1867, in
Peru, Illinois, on America’s western frontier. Her
grandparents were Methodist missionaries in Ohio,
Wisconsin and Illinois before the Civil War. Her father
William Bramwell Powell (1836-1904) was an
innovative educator, who earned a national reputation
as superintendent of public schools in Peru, then
Aurora, Illinois, and finally in Washington, D.C. Her
mother Wilhelmina Bengelstraeter Paul (1843-1925)
was an accomplished pianist and gifted amateur
composer. She and Maud’s aunts were active in the
women’s suffrage movement. Her uncle John Wesley
Powell was a Civil War hero and the first explorer of the
Grand Canyon. He organized the scientific study of the
western lands and of the native American Indians as the
powerful director of the U.S. Geological Survey and
Bureau of Ethnology and founder of the National
Geographic Society.

A prodigy, Maud Powell began violin study at
seven in Aurora, then studied four years with William
Lewis in Chicago. She completed her training with the
great masters Henry Schradieck in Leipzig, Charles
Dancla in Paris and Joseph Joachim in Berlin. She made
her New York début in 1885 at eighteen performing the
Bruch G minor Violin Concerto with America’s
foremost conductor Theodore Thomas and the New
York Philharmonic. The intelligence, energy, and
vigour in her playing reflected her American spirit and
the brilliance, optimism and enthusiasm with which she
lived. Powell performed with all the great European and
American conductors and orchestras of her day, knew
nearly every contemporary European and American
composer personally and their music, and received
international acclaim as one of the greatest artists of her
time as she toured from St Petersburg in Russia, to
South Africa, and to Hawaii.

Although Powell died of a heart attack while on
tour on 8th January 1920, at the early age of 52, during
her short lifetime she transformed the art of violinplaying
and set a new standard for performance and
programming. A legendary figure, her influence was
pivotal in the development of classical music in North
America. Through her devotion to her violin, her art,
and humanity, she became America’s first great master
of the violin, winning the love and admiration of all
who fell under the spell of her commanding bow and
magnetic personality.

Maud Powell once said: “If you are born with music
in you, to follow that voice is the only life possible for
you to lead”. For her, happiness was “self-expression.”
In her quest for self-fulfillment Powell accepted nothing
less than full recognition as a complete human being,
capable of the heights and depths of human
achievement and emotion without limitation of any
kind. She excelled at a time when the attitude of the
American public mirrored European contempt for
American musicians, quashing the aspirations of all but
the most courageous, gifted and committed artists.
Maud Powell did not change her name when she made
her début in 1885. She openly affirmed her American
birth, temperament and ideals, becoming a strong,
influential advocate for American musicians,
composers, artists and cultural institutions. Even with
the influx of great foreign artists of the Russian, French
and German schools, she remained Maud Powell,
American, revered for her unique artistry, loved for her
thoroughly down-to-earth personality.

“Character,” Powell believed, made the difference
in her art and in the success of her career. Discipline and
hard work made her a master of her instrument, she
insisted. “I have ever sought artistic truth according to
the light that has been given me. Whatever conviction
carries with my work is because it has been developed
and is myself.” A spirit of exploration and adventure
drew her to push back the American frontiers musically
and artistically. Optimism, vision and determination
kept her at it despite conditions that would discourage
the heartiest souls. Facing skeptical audiences,
impresarios and conductors, she summoned the nerve
repeatedly to prove herself in each new city or town,
although her reputation in European capitals and major
American cities was well established. She maintained a
discipline of courtesy in her dealings with people of
every station. It was a courtesy that broke out into
unfettered enthusiasm so often that she formed lasting
friendships in every community she visited. The
violinist and conductor Mary Davenport-Engberg
credited her long conversations with Maud Powell for
her perseverance in becoming the first woman music
director of civic orchestras of men and women, the
Bellingham and the Seattle symphonies.

While Maud Powell could lose her temper when
mothers brought babies to adult concerts, she revelled in
playing for school children throughout the country.
“She was the friend of the children the instant she
appeared on the platform,” one teacher testified. “The
whole town is crazy about Madam Powell.” The
warmth of Powell’s humanity leapt from the stage,
winning her audiences and emboldening young
violinists to seek her advice, even to the point of
knocking on her front door at Gramercy Park in New
York City, where they received a warm welcome.
Powell engaged the 22-year-old pianist Arthur Loesser
to tour with her in 1915-16. He remembered it as “my
great adventure in becoming acquainted with my own
country”. Powell shared with him her keen interest in
the native Indians and geology of the American West
and took him on a mule ride into the Grand Canyon.

Laughter buoyed Powell’s happy marriage to her
English manager-husband H. Godfrey Turner. Whether
Maud was studying or performing music, gardening,
boating, bird-watching, climbing in New Hampshire’s
White Mountains, or designing their summer home,
Turner’s supportive presence and humour made
recreation “fun” and touring less onerous, even when
travelling with a concert grand piano. A nature-lover,
Powell refused to wear rare bird plumage in her hats and
planted trees on which birds could nest and feed.

Maud Powell continually overcame barriers to her
art and prejudices that threatened to waylay her journey
to self-fulfilment right up to the end of her life. In 1909
she stood up to the newly appointed New York
Philharmonic director Gustav Mahler’s initial
prejudice: “What? I play Beethoven with a woman, and
an American?” he exclaimed, as he drew his pencil
through her name, eliminating her from the classic
series and putting her down for the Mendelssohn in the
romantic series. Taking her place on stage at the
rehearsal, she turned to the violin section and said:
“Here is where I spit on my hands!” She performed the
Mendelssohn concerto beautifully, guiding the
fumbling Mahler, whose unfamiliarity with the piece
was evident, but they swung through the finale in
perfect accord. Amazed and ecstatic, Mahler stepped
from his stand, took Powell’s hand and paid her
compliments. Within the week he offered her the
Beethoven without reservation. Her collaboration with
Mahler in the Beethoven became one of the “supreme
moments” in her artistic life.

Despite official Washington’s doubts about
allowing a “one-woman show” of “highbrow” music to
entertain World War I soldiers, Maud Powell played for
the men “as one human being to another” and won their
hearts simply by being her “natural self,
unconventional, without any formality”. Although her
tours of the training camps seriously impaired her
health leading to her early death, she threw her “whole
soul...into her work,” it was reported, and at the close of
one concert, “the men rose in a body and gave three
mighty, deafening cheers”. “I shall never forget that
moment,” Maud said, her “greatest thrill” in playing for
the soldiers.

Powell acknowledged she lived a full life, but she
warned young aspirants: “The game is not worth the
candle unless your music is a part of your very fibre,
your breath of life. If you love it thoroughly, love it
objectively and cannot be happy without it, then go
ahead. But you wouldn’t have needed me to decide for
you, you would have been impelled by something
within, regardless of advice or a thousand warnings.”

Powell remained true to her tenth rule on practising:
“Love your instrument as yourself. But love your art
more than either. Nothing was ever accomplished
without faith and enthusiasm.” One of her good friends
observed: “She was bent on being a broad musician and
a truly educated woman. There were books on her table;
there were thoughts in her mind of woman’s work in all
lines of activity; she felt the world’s needs in the larger
sense.”

When she died, the heartbreak of thousands was
expressed by Musical America: “To chronicle the death
of Maud Powell as a shock to music-lovers fails to
express in anything like its fullness the poignant and
personal sense of loss which proceeds from the
untimely taking-off of a supreme and unforgettable
artist. From the circle privileged to know Mme Powell
personally, will be absent one whose kindliness, charm
and great-heartedness, shown especially in her
encouragement of the aspirants to greatness in her own
line, cannot be replaced. It seems impossible that this
great and beautiful personality can have gone from us!
Come what other geniuses or the fiddle may, the loss of
Maud Powell is irreparable.”